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Support Assist deletes legitimate programs from registry
Hello,
I enjoy flight simulation on my computer and have discovered the following issue. When I install a certain third party aircraft into my Perpar3D flight simulator, it installs the aircraft and a secondary program PMDG Operations Center that contains purchase data to verify the product has been purchased as well as ability to perform certain processes outside the flight simulator. The files of the program hard drive location and the aircraft files in the flight simulator have been excluded from antivirus scanning. This my antovirus is not doing this. However I have discovered that Support Assist when running consistently deletes registry entries that remove the ability to install and uninstall the aircraft from the Windows 10 Add Remove programs app, and delete the information that shows that I have purchased the program. I have to reinstall everything, and it is time consuming because I have reconfigure some 40 aspects of the aircraft due to the reinstallation. Many others have reported this same identical problem with the program in question on Flight sim forums with Dell SupportAssist on their computers.
I like being able to have SupportAssist to troubleshoot etc, but if it consistently deletes registry entries that correspond to legitimate programs, that is harmful. I have no idea why it does this and it makes me worry what else is being deleted on from my registry. Unlike Antivirus programs there seems to be no detailed history of what is deleted or a way to make SupportAssist stop doing this by informing SupportAssist that a certain program is legitimate.
Are there any solutions this beyond not running Support Assist?
Greg
Dell-Martin S
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April 29th, 2019 05:00
Greg100
125 Posts
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April 30th, 2019 10:00
Hello,
I do not have a screenshot of the entry that is being deleted in the registry. But for me at this time, the only solution would be to run SA manually one process at a time and skip the one that cleans the registry. However as per my other post, I cannot get SA to run only manually as even with that option selected it will run on its own, thus I have to postpone it to run quarterly and then re-postpone another quarter before it is scheduled to run as a workaround to having it run by itself and forcing me to reinstall the program in question.
Thanks,
Greg
decotime
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May 10th, 2019 18:00
Hi
Im also having this same issue, you need to allow users to select what files they want cleaned, so important flight simulator files (or other game files) are not deleted and affecting 3rd party addons in the sim.
I have also narrowed it down to this dell support assist program doing the damage to my registry and deleting important file it should not touch. Then im forced every time I use the sim to reinstall the whole product over and over - (PMDG 747-8). Ive spent a lot of money on this pc and expected better from a support assist program. Clearly you need to work on it. It currenty has no option to disable cleaning of the registry or an option to select what you need cleaned.
We need a fix
regards
Jeff
Greg100
125 Posts
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May 11th, 2019 15:00
Thanks Jeff for posting this and supporting me, and demonstrating that others are being affected by this issue, Yet I am puzzled by this forum, given my original post was on 1/29/2019, and still no evidence of troubleshooting going on her by Dell support who appear to very rarely look at the forum.Perhaps the forum moderators could let us know what we can expect by way of interaction/support here.
Greg